You guys who are
downloading music without paying for it are
stealing, you know. Is it so hard to admit? Why do you need to come up with justifications for it, when everyone already knows anyways. You are no better than someone lifting a crate of
CD's off of the back of a truck, or from a
music store. The only difference is lack of physical labor involved.
Suddenly you can get songs for free on p2p products and suddenly everyone is a communist. "Art should be free." It belongs to the people!
Yeah, right.
If not for the artist, the art would not be there for you to enjoy. How can you claim to have the right something you could not possibly have on your own? You are getting something from someone else. Something you obviously enjoy. So if the artist does not want to give it away, than he/she can make that choice.
"The Napster fracas is the first step on that road." The first step on the road to getting artists treated like shit. What is the problem with paying the artist for his/her work?
"Music should be free"? It is a highly valued service, in capitalism, valuable things are paid for. Maybe if we were communists it should be free, along with everything else. But how come I don't hear people speaking so passionately that food and shelter should be free. Those are things that people need to survive. If anything should be free, it is those things.
If there is one thing that can be learned from Napster it is how flimsy most peoples morals are. Almost everyone is a thief when they can get away with it. What's worse than the thief is the thief who says he is not a thief, making up justifications.
In reply to Excalibre and others that have messaged me with similar things to say...
I believe that copying someone’s material, even though it does not take something from the owner, is still stealing if you would have bought it anyways. In the Madonna example below, I do not think that is stealing because you would not have bought it anyway. It really is not different from hearing it on the radio, and I do not think that listening to something you would not buy is a concern to anyone. What I am concerned with is when you are downloading music that you would of otherwise bought.
Perhaps there are people like Excalibre who buy more music than they would if there was not p2p software. I do not know anyone else who that is true of, however. I know people who had huge collections of CD’s but have not bought any at all since they started using Napster. These people would be paying for it if they could not get it for free.
So the question is whether the artist has a right to payment from these people. Under normal circumstances these guys would buy a CD. Buying a CD is paying for the privelage to listen to the music as much as you want, not for the rival, exlcudable, compact disc. People downloading music for this reason are simply ripping off the artist. These artists are distributing their product in exchange for payment. When people download music, intending to enjoy extensively (rather than just sample it or casually listen, as one would do over MTV or the radio), than they are using something that they do not deserve to have.
Repeating what I said above, music is the creation of the artist. The artist is providing somehing that you cannot get anywhere else, that is why the artist deserves to have property rights for their work. So if they choose, they can sell it.
Just because it is not a tangible, rival, excludable good, does not determine whether or not you are entitled to have it. In whatever form you get the music the same rights to the artist still apply. I recieved messages telling me, among other things, the definition of ‘theft’, specifying that it is taking something away from someone, when in this case it is not taking away, it is copying. Call it what you want, but it is taking something that you should have paid for, but did not.